Re: <documenta X><blast>
Keller Ann Easterling (kae3@columbia.edu)
Sat, 19 Jul 1997 11:20:40 -0400 (EDT)
This little bit of reverie may be cliche, but it really is remarkable the
ways in which our tools and landscape actually physically formats our mind
and formats the way we think our mind works. We can make it follow the
habits and protocols of a magnet or a desert or a fetish. One imagines
every new tool has been used to physicalize virtual operations. Mechanical
and electrical and organic things are used in so many vernacular
expressions which are trying to express some process of ideation or
thought. My grandmother uses many of the behaviors of different recipes
and materials to characterize her thoughts and her interactions with
people. Still it is remarkable how these processes of ideation or what we
call "feelings" are regarded as somehow unknowable, impossible to express
without poetry or an aura of spirituality. The virtual is still so
invisible in the daily commerce of our lives. So few people train
themselves to use it, like any muscle or any tool in any ordinary
craftQtrain themselves to use it in a way which is palpable. Some people
who train their virtual beings as a matter of course (actors are one group
who do this in a workmanlike way) have a very different physical demeanor
to me. Animals, too, so clearly rely on a different set of virtual and
sensory parameters which make them powerful and attractive. I can see my
dog literally using her mind to do different things, store memories and
locations etc. Of course, these things, or anything that does not align
with our limited occidental frame of mind and its insistent language
system are regarded as mystical
and silly. But they seem like such simple and practical crafts to me.
These new digital tools are treasured, even loved, because they seem to
express some operative of thoughtQyet another tool with another set of
prompts. It would really be an amazing thing if we were watching streams
of data from Mars instead of just reviewing some narrow bandwidth of
outcome expressed in photographs and stupid rock names. I like all these
entries in the forum so much because they are clear expressions of things
that usually go unexpressed and they have a funny kind of public intimacy.
(I confess to inactively listening in a bit. If you go out of town or
miss a few days, its like trying to enter a game of jump rope) The
entries are also both raw and composed in very sophisticated ways. Its
very satasfying airspace sometimes. I wonder what kind of broader
cultural effects there will be as a result of our newest tools --to inform
our dumb media broadcasts, book contractss and face to face conversations.
Sometimes it seems as if these realms really need to maintain their
dumbness or even to increase it. Make a greater volume of celebrity books,
have 24 hours of continuous coverage of the same exact thing overa nd over
again. This dumbness and desire for repetition fascinates me too. When
we were putting together the publication for documenta we talked a bit
about this desire